Prince Edward Sells Death Benefits of Duke’s Award

One of the pillars of the Marketing Concept is the idea of selling the benefits of your product or service. Benefits relate to the value that the purchaser or user gets from using what is offered.

The recent observation by HRH Prince Edward that there might some allure in the risk of death from participating in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme is a fascinating case study for several reasons.

The first has to be the lesson it gives to us all about the speed and reach of the digitally connected world. The reputation of any brand can be affected in an instant. Brand identities that have been meticulously crafted over years can be undermined in the time it takes to say something careless.

The second lesson is that there is always a difference between what is said and what it means. As Bandler and Grinder have noted “The meaning of communication is the way it is received”. Whilst the Prince thought he might have been conveying a dark sense of humour his remarks were unlikely to have been heard as ‘funny’ by relatives of Duke of Edinburgh Award participants who had died whilst they were taking part on the scheme.

The third lesson is never confuse an ‘advantage’ with a ‘benefit’. Product and Service advantages are what the seller assumes are appealling dimensions of what is offered. The Prince seems to have ‘fast forwarded’ from a hunch that the demanding and thrilling aspects of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award means that risk of death is a good thing. Oops.

Clearly what has happened is an unfortunate turn of phrase. I’m not sure that Death could ever be construed as a ‘benefit’ when selling products unless you are an arms dealer. I think the Prince is quite right to highlight the appeal of thrill-seeking, and that the DOEA organisers are right to emphasise that the award is about developing individuals as safely as possible. The prospect of challenge and risk must figure as one of the key psychographic choice factors of the target segment who are likely to join the scheme.

There are clearly personal experiential and transformative benefits associated with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and these should be emphasised. The transformative and beneficial effects of Death is perhaps a more challenging ‘sell’.

Find out more at Duke of Edinburgh Award

Does Business School Thinking Affect Marketing Action?

Does business school thinking change the way that marketing executives do their job? Or do business schools simply look at how marketing done in the ‘real world’ and school business students in what already takes place?

I’m pretty sure that most marketing executives are unaware (and probably disinterested) in alot of the very specific and arcane thinking and research work of the majority of marketing academics. This is a fact that worries some academics as they perceive an increasing gap developing between what academics find ‘interesting’ and what marketing practioners would like to know in order to be better at what they do. There are many journal articles on this theme such as:

Musings on Relevance and Rigor of Scholarly Research in Marketing. Varadarajan, P. Rajan. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Fall2003, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p368-376

Beyond the one-dimensional marketing manager: The discourse of theory, practice and relevance. Brownlie, Douglas; Saren, Michael. International Journal of Research in Marketing, May97

The Academy and The Practice: In Principle, Theory and Practice Are Different. But, in Practice, They Never Are. Pringle, Lewis C.. Marketing Science, Fall2001, Vol. 20 Issue 4

The concern in Business Schools is growing so much that the July 2009 edition of The Journal of Marketing leads with a guest editorial by David Reibstein, George Day and Jerry Wind called Is Marketing Academia Losing Its Way?

I’m not sure this is actually the case. At the moment there are two key interelated conversations taking place. One in Academic circles and the other in the digital Social Media space.

The mantra of the Social Media is all about connecting, collaboration, networks, open source, and influence. (At the extremes of course its about SEO or internet selling but the dominant theme is about the social dimension and serving your customers well.)

The hot topic in Business School marketing is Service Dominant Logic This is an idea put forward by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch in a 2004 Journal of Marketing article called Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. In a nutshell it claims that a new ‘theory’ of marketing is necessary to explain how marketing is done in the 21st century. The authors emphasise its not simply making a case for the value of Service Marketing versus Goods Marketing its actually concerns a profound mind-set change that embraces, co-creation, collaboration, and networks.

So how much of what we read on blogs, airport lounge management books, marketing magazine articles and so on really comes from this original source? and how much is the work of Vargo and Lusch simply a reflection of what is happening ‘out there’ in the real world? Perhaps it becomes self referencing. Marketers seeking out ‘academic’ verification and a pat on the back for things they are up to. A sort of co-creation is good because Pine, Gilmour, Vargo and Lusch say it is and overlooking the possibility that these writers might be simply making sense of what they see not actually prescribing something marketers should do!

As for Academia the Vargo and Lusch article has ruffled feathers. Not everyone has bought into the appeal of a new marketing logic that replaces the old ‘wonky’ one of Levitt and Kotler. In particular John and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy have claimed in their January 2009 Vol 43 no.5/6 European Journal of Marketing article The Service Dominant Perspective:a backward step that the Vargo and Lusch approach is a crude attempt to provide the impossible. They imply that seeking on absolute theory of marketing is based on a ill-founded positivistic assumptions. The idea that ‘out there’ there is an ideal form of Marketing just waiting to be discovered. They favour a multi-perspective approach. There are many ways to explain marketing.

Now how relevent this debate is for every day marketing is a moot point. It seems on the one hand we have a desire to improve the decision making and problem solving capability of everyday marketers and the other we have curiosity in marketing as a social phenomenon.

Maybe just maybe the muti-persepective approach is what Marketing really needs because versatility of perspective encourges innovative thinking. So think again when you read blogs and tweets about the service dominant imperative. Are you un-thinkingly being forced done one channel of thought. Are you sure you really know which marketing school is influencing what you do!

Is Marketing Wicked?

Depending on who you are this question will probably mean something different to you.

A person who was born in the 1990s might think I was asking if marketing was a ‘good thing’, perhaps a cutting edge career, something to really aspire to. On the other hand someone who has doubts about the value of consumersim and the ethics of materialism might think I was asking about the moral basis of marketing thought and practice. The sort of concerns that can be found on websites such as Marketing Ethics and Criticism

Both are likely to disappointed. The question is really about how marketing is understood by marketing professionals and the notion of ‘wicked’ refers to the types of wicked, complex and ambiguous phenomena first characterised by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in their 1973 paper Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.

A crucial aspect of their idea is that ‘wickedness’ isn’t about how difficult something is per se. The opposite of wicked problems are tame problems. Tame problems are often hard to solve but they use familiar tried and tested problem solving methods to crack them. The example that is often given is the game of Chess. Chess presents ‘tame’ problems. The challenges presented might be difficult but how the pieces move, and how to solve the challenges is essentially the same time after time. This is the sort of thinking that people use when they’ve had alot of experience in a particular business sector and are often heard to claim that they know everything there is to know about the business. Wicked problems can’t be solved in the same way. They involve situations with multiple causes, they have multiple explanations provided by stakeholders with different opinions and values and according to Michael Pacanowsky in his article Team Tools for Wicked Problems they “involve us in dialogue that includes our definition of the problem, the algorithm we try to invent or employ, the information we consider relevant, the solution we find, and the outcomes we ultimately achieve. Wicked problems necessarily have an interative nature to them”

Classic Marketing Management schools us in the belief that the business environment whilst dynamic and changeable, can be tamed and controlled through the application of the principles of ‘scientific management’. The ideas of Rittel and Webber imply that the business environment isn’t ‘tame’ (routine and familiar problems and solutions). Marketing Executives are constantly faced with ‘wicked’ (supriseful, complex, unfamiliar situations requiring innovative and imaginative solutions) too. And they look like this…

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.(we can’t simply say it’s a sales problem, a pricing problem, a distribution problem etc)

2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. (unlike tame problems where you clearly know when you’ve ‘cracked’ it, for e.g.we can’t say for certain that ‘we have sorted our Service Marketing strategy now’)

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse. (this implies power and politics have a role to play in decision making too)

4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.(obviously a worry for those who depend on the scientfic method of experimentation to test and control variables in order to inform their decision making)

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly. (So if we change our sales structure we have changed our business environment and we now have to deal with a new reality)

6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.

7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.

8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.(forget looking for a root cause, its impossible to find)

9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.(what glasses are you wearing? the world through brass glasses is very different to the world through silver and gold glasses)

10. The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

With these things in mind, now think about the classic linear rational approach to Marketing Planning that is put forward in the majority of standard text books. The marketing plan is ‘sold’ as a solution for structuring complexity. A method that if correctly followed will reveal the best course of action. All you have to do is plug data into the planning algorthim and out pops the solution!

Business Schools are churning out marketing managers bred on this rational systematic problem solving methodolgy, but as Pacanowsky says “Linear problem-solving methods, with the attendant assumptions they make about problem definition, information, and solution, are often insufficient for the task” Might this be the reason that Marketing Plans are merely ‘shelf-ware’ once they have been written? They don’t actually solve the problems they were intended to solve!

To end on a contemporary note. Take a look at how marketeers are trying to understand and make sense of Social Media. There are multiple explanations, its not easy to pin down, some people are trying to ‘tame’ it by fitting into classic processes. Often people will tell you just ‘how complicated Social Media is and hard it is to explain to the CEO what it is all about’. Its difficult to test and measure. Its in a perpetual state of trial and error. No one really has the answer.

Marketing is wicked, isn’t it!

Links to articles (will need journal subscriptions):
Team Tools for Wicked Problems
Strategy As A Wicked Problem

Critical Marketing

How seriously do marketing practioners question the assumptions they act upon? I don’t mean questioning the effectiveness of the tools and techniques they use, I mean the very foundations of contemporary practice. Notions such as the necessity for competition, the value and benefit of technological applications such as CRM and Social Media, the logic of materialism and consumerism.

How many marketing people believe the purpose of their role is to become proficient in the language and jargon of the profession and proficient in understanding and applying the ‘given’ generic tools of basic marketing education, and how many critically question the value of the approach and tools for people organisations and society?

So what? well perhaps facing up to these questions might begin to help ‘marketing’ influence and persuade people of its value.

Marketing people seem to be very good at defining other people’s Value Propositions and remarkably poor at convincingly articulating their own.